Getting to Know You

By

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Updated May 15, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

Here's a riddle of American exceptionalism: How can this country be at once one of the most religiously fervent in the world and one of the most religiously tolerant? Generally, societies are one or the other. Which makes intuitive sense: If you take your faith seriously, if you believe that it is the only true one (as the Abrahamic faiths seem to demand), then you might not be able to get along with people who believe something different -- that is, with people who are in error. In Western Europe, church attendance is low and tolerance, at least superficially speaking, is high. In the Middle East, meanwhile, religious observance is very high and tolerance is . . . well, need we say more?

But here in America, where more than half the population attends church at least once a month, 85% of us believe that religious diversity is good for the country and 80% of us think that there are basic truths in many religions. In fact, Americans overwhelmingly believe that people of other religions can go to heaven.

So what gives?

Political scientists Robert Putnam of Harvard and David Campbell of Notre Dame are trying to find out. Their book, "American Grace: The Changing Role of Religion in American Civic Life," won't come out until next year, but the two scholars shared some of their findings at a recent gathering sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The authors said that they had conducted a survey of 3,100 people in the summer of 2006 and reinterviewed the same people a year later. They found that Americans have remarkable rates of "religious bridging," a phrase they use to describe relationships between people of different faiths. Such bridging -- at least in part -- accounts for Americans' warm feelings toward people of other faiths.

If you ask Americans about their five closest friends -- the sociological equivalent of T-Mobile's "fave five" -- it turns out that, on average, between two and three of them are of other faiths. And more than half of Americans are actually married to someone of a different faith from the one in which they were raised. Just to be clear: For two people to be counted by Messrs. Campbell and Putnam as of different faiths, they must be from significantly different traditions; if they are both Protestants, one must be evangelical and the other mainline.

These are remarkable findings. While the authors have not broken down data from other countries yet, one need not spend a lot of time in France or Saudi Arabia to realize that these kinds of interfaith friendships and marriages are the exception, not the norm, there.

The effect that all of this religious bridging has on American attitudes is even more interesting. By surveying people two years in a row, the authors were able to look at who had added a friend of another faith in the intervening time and to see how those respondents reacted differently to particular questions.

At the Pew event, Mr. Campbell demonstrated the book's findings on a sort of religious "thermometer" -- actually, two of them: one measuring people's attitudes toward other faiths and another measuring them again after interfaith friends were added. The first measurement showed Americans, on average, feeling "warmth" (or positive feelings) toward Jews and Catholics and coolness (negative feelings) toward evangelicals -- and something approaching iciness toward Buddhists, Mormons and Muslims, who scored at the bottom of the "temperature" gauge.

If respondents gained a Catholic friend over the course of the year, their feelings of warmth toward Catholics almost doubled. If respondents befriended an evangelical, then evangelicals as a group "completely closed the gap," according to Mr. Campbell -- meaning that they inspired neutral feelings instead of negative ones.

Sorting out cause and effect is one of the most difficult aspects of such studies, but by controlling for a variety of other factors, the researchers were able to determine with a good deal of certainty that it was adding the friend that inspired the warmer feelings, not vice versa.

It is more difficult to sort out the question of interfaith marriage. Are people more inclined to marry someone of another faith because they are more tolerant? Or do they become more tolerant when they marry someone of a different faith?

Mr. Putnam is quick to note that a marriage touches people beyond the bride and groom. And our in-laws may affect us in the same way that our friends do. "Everyone," Mr. Putnam says, "has an Aunt Susan," some member of your extended family who is of another faith. And while you may know intellectually that your own faith does not allow for the possibility of nonbelievers achieving salvation, you think that "Aunt Susan" is a nice person. And you decide that "Aunt Susan is exactly the kind of person heaven is built for."

So do Americans stop going to church or believing in a particular faith when they realize that Aunt Susan may not be going to heaven? It turns out that the answer is no. Call it cognitive dissonance or social accommodation, but Americans are just as religious after adding a friend of another faith to their inner circle as before.

This finding bodes well for the health of American religion and for American tolerance. The groups that tend to do the best on the religious thermometer are those that are well-represented across the country. Those who are most geographically concentrated -- Jews excepted -- inspire the most negative feelings. Most Americans in the Midwest don't run into a lot of Mormons, and most Americans in the Northeast don't have a lot of evangelical neighbors. But we are a very mobile population. Americans move for college, for careers and for family.

And as we encounter people of other backgrounds, Messrs. Putnam and Campbell show, we do not turn inward and reject them in favor of abstract lessons we were once taught. Instead we let the "facts on the ground" help us form our conclusions. If Aunt Susan belongs in heaven, she will get there.

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